Jost Amman was perhaps the inventor of the motif in 1579, but it was taken up and elaborated by the Monogrammist BKGF in 1590 [SEE ALSO my “Sieving the Suitors” post here] and then copied 6 years later by the de Brys in their enormously influential Emblemata Saecularia…

This mischievous motif seems to have originated in 16C Germany. The commonest type of this trick numeration shows 2 fools but is captioned “(now) there’s 3 of us” — making the viewer by his/her puzzled inquiry, the 3rd! In the albums to date I have noticed only “3”…

From its earliest appearance in the Pugillus Facetiarum (Strasbourg, 1608,1618) the motif was taken up by the album amicorum painters and endured as an independent engraved sheet into the 18C Three young men try their luck at bowling for the first prize woman. The ladies declare themselves (?)…

In 2021, together with Dana Jenei, I compiled a study of this motif including all examples known to me at that date: Dana Jenei & Malcolm Jones, “Woman and the men of the Four Elements” in ed. Dana Jenei, In Honorem Razvan Theodorescu (Bucharest, 2021), 190-204 [available here:…

Here people quite literally go through the world/globe. They may have to bend as in the earliest example here (the painting attributed to Patinir) or they may simply have grown old by the time they emerge as in the album amicorum examples. (Man with upright stick) MET RECHT…

Because the caption verse includes the origins of her sexual parts, it is sometimes censored Some time in the early 1620s, Hans Ludwig Pfinzing von Henfenfeld pasted into his album a print which appears in some copies of Peter Rollos’ Philotheca Corneliana (Berlin, 1619, 1623). It depicts seven…